Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

Moving houses was no small hill to climb: the ground a bog, the sky alternating between soaked towel and

white flag of chagrin, sad to have muddied our boots. The hydrangeas

wanted a trestle; the mailbox wanted a can of paint – orange, we said,maybe, like the dawn we could see and the nightfall we couldn’t, the endof days hiding behind the firs and

the bulk of the neighbor’s house.Every dusk its shadows lurked morecraftily until I couldn’t stand them,

wanted so much to watch the sunmelt and its guts seep slowly out

above the back yard that next to a cup of tea, book slipping insistently from my lap, I dozed and dreamt of

taking a sledgehammer to the new wall, battering through prints and

plaster to a channel of almost night, one more outline pressing dim and plain against the fenced-in trees.

And When What We Knew Did Not Devour Us

Train conductors everywhere, and my hair in is ropes.

This word-binder wellenough approaches a stylus, putters day in and out along

the same bough-arched way

where our mothers liked to hitch verbs to nonsense. They, ten and skipping;

I, weariedand arguably morose—yet the mad libs remain, outstaying us.

What to do when the half-forgotten apple of our beyondness is not an engine,

is not churning valiantly, unfailingly

along? I eat sorrow as danger ebbs, see

a new coil of it unfurl now to let go the crowd of everyone who will not beme: warnings run

aground, gasping on a wide and verdant shore.

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft's poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Harpur Palate, The Carolina Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Nashville Review, and Southern Humanities Review. This fall, Suzanne is starting her MFA in poetry at The University of California, Irvine.